Breakthroughs Blog

City of Hope has so many breakthroughs in cancer, diabetes and HIV/AIDS - and so many stories - that we've tailored our blog, Breakthroughs, to provide something for every reader. Whether the breakthroughs are about medical research, treatment advances or personal triumphs, they're all connected.

Do you know how palliative medicine helps patients? The misconception is that palliative care is designed to provide comfort and pain control to people at the end of their lives. It's actually much more than that.

Palliative care is crucial in cancer treatment. New guidelines, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, were developed by a multidisciplinary expert panel and recommended that patients with advanced cancer should receive dedicated palliative care services, early in the disease course.

As cancer survival rates in the United States increase due to improving detection and treatment protocols, a growing number of patients are faced with a new and difficult challenge - living with chronic pain. Interventional pain medicine, a new specialty that draws from several branches of medicine, can provide relief to patients suffering from long-term pain.

For more than 40 years, Marcia M. Grant, one of the most respected nurse researchers in the country, has devoted her life to others. Now, with a prestigious award, the American Cancer Society has said a heart-felt "thank you".

When Beverly Fairbairn was invited to join a major City of Hope study on palliative care as part of her treatment for lung cancer, she was taken aback.
“Are you talking to me??” she remembers thinking. “But I feel fine right now. I'm not there yet.”
Like so many others, Fairbairn assumed palliative care was little more than crisis-level pain control for patients in their final days. Fairbairn's cancer was in remission. She was healthy. The mere suggestion that she be included in the study stirred up a little paranoia: “Do they know something I don't?” she wondered.

From left: Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope Vice Provost and Associate Director David Horne, students Galen Gao, May Hui and Lauren Li, City of Hope Provost and Chief Scientific Officer Steven T.

Just because you can treat a condition, such as high cholesterol, at the end of life — well, that doesn't mean you should . That's the basic lesson of a study to be published March 30 in JAMA Internal Medicine .

Betty Ferrell, director and professor of nursing research and education at City of Hope, is the principal investigator of ELNEC, a palliative-care education program that has helped end-of-life care evolve worldwide.

There’s more to cancer care than simply helping patients survive. There's more to cancer treatment than simple survival. Cancer patients should report their pain to their caregivers, and enlist their doctors to help them manage it.